Feeding Dicebox.
Ordinarily, it updates every Wednesday, but the schedule’s been a little erratic lately, what with the freelance work and all. (I never did get around to saying anything about the zombies that couldn’t be zombies, did I. They went with the swamp instead. Some other time.) —Anyway: wouldn’t it be great if you had a program or a website that checked your favorite blogs and webcomics and suchlike for you, and let you know when they updated?
The Spouse has set up a couple of RSS feeds for Dicebox: this one will send a link to the latest page whenever it updates; this one feeds the update itself straight to you. Fire up the feedreaders and hit that add button.
Der Familienvater.
I’d say this was the apocalypse to Bite Me’s masquerade, but someone would start cracking ultraviolet underworld jokes, and that’s hardly the point. Dylan Meconis is back! Well, her comics, I mean. New ones. That update every Wednesday. That’s what’s back. Except with fewer chicken gags. I think.
Enter Sandman.
I should have been a Superman fan: greathearted utopian science fables starring the big blue boyscout who insists on seeing the best in us; who acts as if that’s all there could possibly be—what’s not to love?
The first Superman comic I ever read?
Number 234, from 1971. —I didn’t read it in 15¢ floppy form; it was stuck in an odd compilation of Batman and Superman stuff that had probably been assembled in England a couple of years later and printed and bound in cheap hardback and ended up in my hands in Iran. (The Batman piece I don’t remember as clearly, but then, I was already into Batman: I think it was one of the ones where he went to Tibet or something.)
And I know I knew something of the story of Superman, but I can’t remember exactly what; Superman’s a myth, after all, and the thing about myths is you always already know them. Even so, this issue is weirdly at odds with his Akashic record. There’s no Lois, no Perry, no Jimmy, no Lex; no Kandor or kryptonite. There is, instead, a volcano, a pissed-off planter, Morgan Edge, and this creepy-ass mofo made of, um, sand—
![[It] stares around at the blazing desolation...](/images/4.jpg)
There’s a reason it seems at odds with the myth: it was deliberately intended to be. Mort Weisinger, who’d edited the Superbooks for quite some time, retired in 1970, and Julie Schwartz took over Superman and gleefully joined the stampede to streamline, revise, refit, and update.
While Sekowsky led Supergirl down an avante garde avenue all her own, the rest of the Superman “family” editors came up with a scheme revolutionary for the industry at the time: Using Superman, as the cornerstone title, they all participated in streamlining the DC universe, openly doing away with such things as kryptonite and imaginary stories, and just plain forgetting about the humorous characters such as Mr. Mxyzptlk, the Bizarros and Krypto. No more Elastic Lad stories for Jimmy Olsen, no more Reptile Girl stories for Lois Lane, no more King Kong stories for Superman.
Boltinoff and Kirby got the “new” DC universe going in Jimmy Olsen #133, October 1970, which in a very real sense introduced a DC Earth as new and streamlined as the one that resulted from the Crisis series 15 years later. Two major DC characters debuted in Kirby’s “new” Jimmy Olsen: Morgan Edge, “president of the Galaxy Broadcasting System, new owners of The Daily Planet,” in JO #133, and in the following issue, the ultimate DC villain, Darkseid. (See Superman in the Fourth World.)
What emerged from the pages of Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Action Comics, World’s Finest (which had become a precursor to the DC Comics Presents style of Superman team-ups), and most tellingly, Superman, was a new, faster-paced Earth (Earth 1A, maybe?), where the central characters simply had too much to do to worry about the secret identity contrivances and the varieties of kryptonite that had dominated their lives in the Weisinger era. Jimmy had the Newsboy Legion, the Hairies, the Outsiders, and D.N.Aliens to occupy his time with; Lois was caught in the middle of a gang war waged between the 100, Intergang and Darkseid’s minions; and Superman… well, in addition to all of the above, he had a new job as a TV reporter in his secret identity of Clark Kent and a sandcreature siphoning off all his powers to deal with. With all that and more going on, there simply wasn’t room to squeeze in Lori Lemaris and the bottle city of Kandor, too.
Heck, the issue just previous to this one stripped green kryptonite of all its plot-hook powers. Earth-shaking! —And you remember what Bill said (what Jules said) about Superman, right?
When Superman wakes up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red S is the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby, when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak, unsure of himself… he’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race, sort of like Beatrix Kiddo and Mrs. Tommy Plumpton.
And yes, that’s an uncharitable read, but still, think of Christopher Reeve as Superman. Weak? Unsure of himself? A coward? —Yes, it was obviously an act, but still. Except not in 1971.
Morgan Edge, Kent’s new boss, reassigns him to his TV station, WGBS, as a roving reporter. Here, too, Swan and Anderson shine. Gone are Kent’s solid blue suits and horn-rimmed glasses; throughout the saga Kent dresses mostly in brown, double-breasted suits with striped blue shirts and white ties, three-piece suits with striped yellow shirts and spotted yellow ties, and variations on these. Kent also switches to wider framed glasses that are more flattering and contemporary, and despite Earth’s yellow sun, his hair has gotten a little thicker.
Schwartz’s editorial vision was clear: no more gimmick-ridden plot contrivances for Superman, and no more wimpy Clark Kent portrayals. Personality-wise, Kent may be a bit bland, but no less a personage than Morgan Edge—the equivalent of, say, Ted Turner—recognizes the quality work Kent’s done for many years, and singles him out to become an on-air TV reporter. You don’t get to be one of the preeminent reporters in the country by being meek and timid, and, recognizing that incongruity, O’Neil dumps the wimpy persona.
But as a kid of—what, six?—these nuances escaped me. Instead, I was puzzled by word and picture splits like this:
Remember, this “red and blue juggernaut” had just been fighting “an eerie, almost shapeless figure” in the sky. We’re told the red and blue juggernaut smashes fiercely into the barrel of the gun, but it’s a muddy, colorless figure we see—not unlike the sandman. Which was it? —The next panel shows Superman getting up, red and blue again despite the rain. What happened? What was going on?
And it’s not like I’m blaming the art or the writing or the editorial direction for my visceral dislike of Superman. (There’s a lot not to like.) But the whole thing made an odd first read for a superhero naïf, and seeing the art again so many years later is weirdly disconcerting—an ur-thing that shaped the very eyes I’m reading it with. (Is it just me, or is the sight of Curt Swan’s grey-flannel face atop that goddamn costume just, y’know, weird?) —The existential threat of that sandman comes out of nowhere—well, the previous issue, sure, but I didn’t have that—and it peters out, unresolved, at the end. Unsatisfying, but in a deeply creepy way that squirmed somewhere under my skin. Batman was much cooler. (This was before I read that Clayface issue out of sequence, mind.)
Years later, of course, it’s creepy for another reason. We can see how prophetic it was:
The Sandman did appear, and (eerie, Shaper) did sap some of the superheroes’ power for itself. For a time.
—But what I didn’t realize (and let’s leave Thomas Hayden Church out of this for the moment, okay? I was never a Marvel zombie), what I didn’t realize, until I started poking around the web for my ur-Superman comic, what I didn’t realize was this: there was always another Sandman.
Sandmann was created in 1959 by East German TV as a result of a race with West German TV to prove socialism was more efficient than capitalism. East Germany won, and since then Sandmann has put several generations of East Germans to sleep with his bed time stories and dream powder. Sandmann is a fairytale character, but he inhabits the real world, an idealised version of East Germany. Sandmann is always at the right place at the right time; he drives a Trabant, he marches with the Jungpioneers, he even travels in Space! With daily broadcast Sandmann promoted the ideas of socialism to his audience; the East German children. He showed the future optimism, technical development and solidarity.
The plots of the films have changed as the East German society has changed, and Sandmann’s life goes parallel to the history of East Germany. This peculiar and slightly different historical documentary portrays the rise and fall of socialism in East Germany seen through life and films of Sandmann.
Greathearted utopian science fables? Starring a Jungpioneer who insists on seeing the best in us; who acts as if that’s all there could possibly be?
Superman
Superman
Rescue me
You’re so brave
and strong
and really care for me
In the end
sure I’ll be
your lover man
Superman
you will come
and rescue me
This is what they have made of us. This is what we have become.
There’s this inch—
An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world that’s worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don’t know who you are, or whether you’re a man or woman. I may never see you. I will never hug you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you.
—and it’s a really lovely thing to think about but ultimately, you know what? That inch is nothing.
They take it as easily as they take the mile and what do you do when it’s done?
Joe Sacco talked to a couple of men we picked up off the street in Iraq and tortured and interrogated and then let go without ever explaining why, and he sees just how easy it is to take that inch away. —Via the Beat.
Strike me pink!
Were I a better comics blogger (which I’m not, no more’n I’m a poliblogger), you wouldn’t have had to have waited for me to read Sara’s LiveJournal in order to find this Comics Reporter link to news of a staggeringly monumental nature:
Still a uniter, not a divider.
You learn a lot whenever you visit wood s lot; today, I learned I agree with the John Birch Society.
NORRIS: Generals Edwin Walker and Clyde Watts both attacked MAD; calling it Communistic. FACT magazine made it out that you counter-attacked the John Birch Society, in the article “MAD Interviews A ‘John Birch Society’ Policeman” from MAD #97, September 1965, because of the Generals’ statements. Was this true?
FELDSTEIN: No! Anti-Communist panic… Red-baiting… and the Cold War with Russia was going on at that time, reaching a peak… and like every other era, including today!... contained serious, frightening reactionary organizations and movements in support of those causes that were beginning to infringe upon our basic Constitutional Liberties and Freedoms. The John Birch Society was one of the more infamous and outstanding of those organizations… and invited, no, begged for a biting, critical, MAD satirical treatment… hence the article, “MAD Interviews a ‘John Birch Society Policeman’”... an extreme point of departure that stressed how the “John Birch Society” thinking… in the hands of a Law Enforcement Officer… could be devastating and dangerous to our Civil Liberties, etc.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
—well, I’m weak:
America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists. In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sites on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. Terrorist assassins have thinned the ranks of the vocal Right. The few conservatives that survived attempts on their lives have been forced underground by the oppressive “Coulter Laws” of 2007. In order to further their cause, they have joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L.
The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a biomechanical engineer affectionately named “Oscar”. F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee. Reagan was born on September 11th, 2001. Reagan has grown to manhood in an ultra-liberal educational system: being told, not asked, what to think. With personal determination, which alienates him from his contemporaries, he has chosen the path less traveled…the path to the Right.
Two decades of negotiation with the U.N., and America’s administration of 2021 (President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore), has culminated in a truce with fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, or so America is told. The honorable ambassador from Afghanistan has come to NYC to address the U.N., his name is Usama Bin Laden.
Although, Ambassador Bin Laden has announced that he will publicly apologize for the “misunderstanding” of the events of 9/11. In actuality, he intends on detonating a tactical nuke that is contained in his private diplomatic briefcase. It is a race against the clock to save NYC from a nuclear holocaust and the world from liberal domination. Only with F.O.I.L.’s help, can “Liberality For All” once again become “Liberty For All!”
—via Fanboy Rampage, which I have got to start reading more often. Original’s over here, at Byrne Robotics. But seriously, folks: Mike Mackey’s dream is to publish “the world’s first conservative comic.” Will no one help him buck the liberal media to realize it?
I don’t mean to insult Gore or those that voted for him (although that is an unfortunate result of the series), In my storyline, he is only one of many more liberals follow him. (think more John Kerry here)
Do you really believe that if UBL were to make an appeal to the U.N. promising an end to world terrorism, That Kofi would not leap at the offer? (At any costs.)
But I think you make my point. Yes, the republicans are in power, but had to fight against the overwhelming mainstream liberal media to do it, and still the Republicans won; this proves a strong conservative base in America. So by now you would think some one would have at least recognized the interest in a book with an extremely conservative message.
Eisners, and a drunken eagle—
Maybe they don’t go all that well together. I’ve been juxtaposing too much, lately. Let’s set them to one side, and the other. First, the Eisner Awards, named for comics giant Will Eisner: the Oscars,™ see, are sort of the Eisners of the movie industry. Heidi MacDonald over at the Beat has some paradigm-shaking news—
Eisner Awards Accepting Webcomics Submissions
The judges for the 2005 Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards are accepting submissions for a possible Best Digital Comic category.
Criteria:
Any professionally produced long-form comics work posted online or distributed via other digital media is eligible. The majority of the work must have been published in 2004. Audio elements and animation can be part of the work but must be minimal. Web comics must have a unique domain name or be part of a larger comics community to be considered. The work must be online-exclusive for a significant period prior to being collected in print form.
Submission:
For webcomics: Send URL and any necessary access information to the Eisner Awards administrator, Jackie Estrada.
For CD or DVD comics: Send disc to Eisner Awards, 4657 Cajon Way, San Diego, CA 92115.
Deadline: March 25, 2005 (but sooner is much preferred)
Things are moving fast: the first webcomic to be nominated at all for any sort of Eisner was Nowhere Girl, back in 2003. At this rate, we’ll have only four or five years of the best webcomics being ghettoized in the Best Digital Comic category and locked out of all the others (since they’ve already got an award of their own, you know). —I kid! Heidi says that somewhere, Scott McCloud is smiling, and I have no doubt he is, so I went to see for myself, and tripped over a link to this good Columbia Journalism Review article on comics journalism, which
reminds us all (you didn’t forget, did you?) of Brought to Light:
Something of that æsthetic range is represented by the two main pieces in the 1989 book Brought to Light. In one half of the volume, Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates tell of the 1984 bombing at a press conference in La Penca, Nicaragua, which killed eight people and injured twenty-eight others. The presentation is straightforward, using plain language and realistic illustrations, and drawing on the accounts of witnesses and the evidence presented in the Christic Institute’s lawsuit alleging CIA involvement in the bombing.
Flip the book over, and you find a story with similar themes told in a very different manner. The celebrated comics innovators Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz present a fable-like retelling of CIA history, narrated by a lonely, alcoholic eagle wearing an ugly checkered sports coat. Sometimes painterly, sometimes cartoonish, in places using techniques of collage, the piece outlines a record of atrocities culminating in the Iran-contra affair. The tone wavers between the confessional and the bombastic, and the imagery employs heavy symbolism, with human chess pieces, sprinting swastikas, and swimming pools full of blood.
But the facts are there, and the nightmarish surrealism seems to fit the subject matter. Indeed, the reader is forced to question the propriety of the standard journalistic conceits—the calm recitation of facts, the carefully hedged allegations, the measured tone. A drunken eagle swimming in blood may actually come closer to the point.
And yeah, I’m saying to myself, yeah: it’s stuff I know, a beat I’ve heard before, hell, I’ve played it, but the CJR slicks it up nice. Comics are an incredibly personal medium—what you’re reading was hand-drawn, handwritten, just for you by the cartoonist (or at least, they look that way) (or at least, they can look that way, they mostly look that way, it’s an effort to look any other way), and that’s a powerful jolt right there of what it was the gonzo folks brought to the table, a jolt we sadly need again. And it’s not just surrealism and naturalism: comics are capable of extremes of pointed emotion and perplexing ambiguity, sometimes in the same dam’ drawing. —But circling in on the point: we know how to read a news article any which way we want to, now. They know how to write ’em any which way they want to, too. But the moves and techniques of comics are still new to a lot of people; we’re still figuring out how they work, ourselves. We haven’t taught ourselves to ignore them, read around them, we haven’t figured out how to innocculate ourselves against them, not yet, not anywhere near to the same degree. And that’s why Joe Sacco’s sad sack rendition of himself and that shrieking, sotted eagle are able to do what they did (do!) so well.
Well, that and talent. And technique, honed over years of backbreaking, unrewarded work. —But aside from that.
And I was going to say something about blogging taking a tip and epiphanies and such but I’m not because why bother. I’m just going to
remind myself that the Eisners are checking out the webcomics. Excuse me; I have some folks I need to pester about getting their stuff ready to submit.
Those who forget are doomed.
Holy Christ. I’d forgotten. It’s been bugging me all this time and I’d clean forgotten until something, some quirk, some happenstance jolt sparking between here and here maybe lit up the memory and I squatted, in the muck, hauled it up, felt a chill…
You’ve seen this, I’m sure.
And we’ve read all the foofooraw and snarked it up about as far as it will go, but there was still, somewhere, deep inside, a chill. You felt it. Didn’t you? I did. And I don’t know where it came from for you, and like I said, I had no idea where it was coming from for me, until I remembered “In Pictopia.” —Buzz Bunny opening that black gash of a sneer and spitting “What’s up, doc?” like it was “This time, it’s personal,” that’s pretty much the moment when Nocturno taps Flexible Flynn on the shoulder and Flynn turns around and he’s, he’s different, and forget for a moment the fact that the changes in the funnybook industry that Moore and Simpson were allegorizing so terribly well in “Pictopia” are no longer a pressing concern; the long Dark Knight of the superhero soul has come and gone and commented ironically on itself and we’ve had nostalgia explosions since then, and joycore, we’ve eaten it all up and gotten used to the idea that the occasional paradigm twitch is part of the paradigm, now, and if Sue Dibny is dead, well, the Teen Titans are tearing up the cartoon ratings. It’s a wash. —Oh! You’re gonna jump when Buzz snarls, all trace of the transvestite trickster god ruthlessly rubbed from his face and voice. It’ll give your innards that twist of wrongness that only Echthroi and the finest committee-dump entertainment product can manage—it’s a pure shot of the visceral punch that Moore and Simpson so lovingly, heartsickly conjure up with the blank flat sneer on Flynn’s steroided face. But the snarl, the sneer, those are just the signs: what’s signified is what you see when you stumble out of Captain Billy’s on the desperate, despairing heels of Nocturno, through the black-and-white streets past windblown scraps of blank paper to the very edge of town where you cling to the chain-link fence. Out there, past all that, is nothing. It’s empty and flat. Far as the eye can see.
Is it getting bigger? Blanker? Coming closer?
Sure, laugh at the Loonatics. It’s gut-bucket funny how bad it is, how naked the opportunism, how shoddy the assembly, how quickly it will fold and be forgotten. But it was here, in the first place. This isn’t bad art; please. That we will always have with us. This is something else, and we may always have that with us, too. Now.
Mind the chill. Remember the run to the fence. We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again.
Hellblazer, not Constantinople—
As far as I’m concerned, it’s Hellblazer that’s the interloper. Check the pedigree: Alan Moore steals Sting from Brimstone & Treacle and has John Totleben and Stephen Bissette do him up as John Constantine, a right bastard foil to the Swamp Thing’s lumbering straight man; he did his business deftly, hinted at a dark and stormy backstory, got in some unforgettable licks, then vanished in a puff of cigarette smoke and an unanswered joke. Beauty.
Then Rick Veitch dragged him back onstage for his run with the bog-god. And then the right bastard got spun off into his own dam’ book, and Jamie Delano got to unwind a lot of that dark and stormy backstory for about 40 issues or so until a rousing what-if send-off with art by the one, the only, Dave McKean. Next month: new creative team! —And all this before the Garth Ennis / Steve Dillon run, which most folks think of as the definitive Hellblazer.
So I wasn’t too put out by the news of the movie. LA? Plenty enough mythology to work from, trust me. (Where else can you find such a hellish city of angels? Thank you, thank you, I’m here all week.) —Keanu? Pfft. Why not? (My knee doesn’t jerk at the mention of his name; him, I can take or leave. Maybe it’s how there’s only a dozen people in the world who know why it is I laugh with such delight whenever I catch him playing Don John.) —The movie can pretty much fly or fall on its own, far as I’m concerned: though it was on the small screen, we’ve already had pretty much the best adaptation of John Constantine to moving images we could hope for. I’m good.
The which said, initial reports aren’t all that enticing.
If Delano and Ennis’ Hellblazer is Mexican food, Constantine is best understood as Taco Bell.
But: on the other hand: Tilda Swinton as Gabriel:
(I do think it’s amusing, though, that the reporter, at least, appears never to have heard of Prophecy. Some might say, with good reason.)
Prolixity.
Alan Moore: Horrible, tatty book, but what this has got in it is lots of crappy little drawings that are indecipherable to anybody else but me, but which are basically all I need for anything re: writing comics. They will give me a breakdown… they’ll just be sort of these pages—these are bits of Promethea—I will break down the page area into a number of panels. Now, I’ve got a simple, mathematical mindless formula that I follow that is—I mean if you look at these little bits of dialogue that go in each of the panels you’ll see that they have little numbers written after each of the lines and what this is is the number of words.
Now, this is basically something that I took from Mort Weisinger, who was the harshest and most brutal—
Daniel Whiston: DC editor?
AM: —of the DC editors during the ’60s.
DW: Bit of a tyrant from what I hear.
AM: Oh Christ, he was a monster, I remember Julie Schwartz telling me—who was a lovely man—he told me about Mort Weisinger’s funeral—and this was probably just an old Jewish joke that he’d adapted—for Mort Weisinger—but he said that apparently during Jewish funerals there’s a part where people can stand up and spontaneously will say a few words about the departed—personal tributes, things like that. So it’s Mort Weisinger’s funeral, and it gets to this bit in the funeral and there’s absolute dead silence, and the silence just goes on and on and on and nobody gets up and says anything and eventually this guy at the back of the synagogue gets up and says: “His brother was worse!” [Laughter.]
But anyway, Mort Weisinger, because he was the toughest of the editors, I thought: “All right, I’ll take his standard as the strictest.” What he said was: if you’ve got 6 panels on a page, then the maximum number of words that you should have in each panel, is 35. No more. That’s the maximum. 35 words per panel. Also, if a balloon has more than 20 or 25 words in it, it’s gonna look too big. 25 words is the absolute maximum for balloon size. Right, once you’ve taken on board those two simple rules, laying out comics pages—it gives you somewhere to start—you sort of know: “OK, so 6 panels, 35 words a panel, that means about 210 words per page maximum.”
DW: And if you’ve got one panel you’d have 210…
AM: …and if you’ve got 2 panels you’d have 105 each. If you’ve got 9 panels it’s about 23 – 24 words—that’ll be about the right balance of words and pictures. So that is why I obsessively count all the words, to make sure that I’m not gonna overwhelm the pictures, that I’m not gonna make—oh, I’ve seen some terrible comic writing where the balloons are huge, cover the entire of the background—
Fighting evil.
I suppose it says—something—that just before the doubletake I was thinking, what, now they’re selling superhero costumes?
Let’s say amen together.
The Mother of All Bombs, folks.
(Why are you still here?)
Comic-page illustrator?
An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.
—The New York Times Corrections: For the Record, 6 January 2005
(Also, they forgot “vast personal fortune.”)
The enemy is life.
Eisner the cartoonist always left me a little cold: shopworn stories and whiskered gags told in some of the most gorgeously expressive cartooning you’ve ever seen. The ink flowed as naturally as breathing, but I’d look up and shrug. Eh. —I’m smart enough not to write him off as a triumph of technique over substance, but even if I weren’t: my God, what technique. I’ve nattered on about how important Scott McCloud and Understanding Comics are in the scheme of things, for laying the groundwork of a grammar of comics and its study. Will Eisner was one of the first cartoonists to look up and realize what they were messing around with, all that ink and newsprint, those squiggles and balloons, was a language. Comics is a language. That’s huge. So I understand why all the cartoonists around me revere him so.
Eisner the man? I shook his hand. I think. Cons are busy, noisy, overwhelming things, and I’m flighty and absent-minded. Maybe I just said hi. He touched Jenn’s cheek once. Which is more important to me than anything I might have said to him, or he to me. Gosh, Mister Eisner, you’re one of the most important figures ever in comics. Well, thanks, young man. —Tasha Robinson once asked him, “Do you think all of your works address heartbreak on some level?” and he said, “Probably. I’m dealing with the human condition, and I’m dealing with life. For me, the enemy is life, and people’s struggle to prevail is essentially the theme that runs through all my books.”
Will Eisner is in intensive care following open heart surgery on Wednesday afternoon. Quadruple bypass. He didn’t want anyone to know until he came through OK, but all signs are that he is recovering terrifically. He’s already joking with the nurses and “biting his lip” over delayed deadlines. [...]
He’s not supposed to return to work for 6 – 8 weeks (I’m making side bets), so it’d be nice in the interim if the industry deluged him with warm words while he’s recuperating.
He knew what he was on about and he did it with everything he had and on the way he taught tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people all over the world how to do what they were doing better, or to do it at all in the first place. He’s left this world a better place for his having been here, and if that doesn’t do much to mitigate the heartbreak of his passing, well, it’s the best any of us can ever hope for. Would that we all could do it half as well as he did. The Spirit is dead; long live the spirit.
The Onion: What is it like seeing the early-1940s Spirit stories back in print again?
Eisner: Well, I love the package. I think the package is marvelous. I try to avoid looking at the artwork because it makes my toes curl. [Laughs.] I want to grab a pencil and redo it. “Oh, my God, did I get away with this junk?”
An atheist, a feminist, and a rabbi walk into a bildungsroman—
A couple years ago, Barry was wondering if he’d ever do a comic book again.
Today, Hereville’s written up in the Washington Post.
(And while we’ve got it up, ponder a moment the volatility of this brave new digital world: that two-year-old post of his is already showing the wear and the tear. Not that I’m any better: my links rotted away in the interim. The blog post he was talking about is now here.)
—It is presumed that all you habitués of the pier subscribe to Girlamatic already, the better to get your weekly fix of Dicebox. But for this week, the first 20 pages of “How Mirka Got Her Sword” are available for free, so go, read, get hooked, subscribe. Hoopla, Barry!
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